Fuse Theory - @etopiei's blog

Unihack 2018 - Reflection

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of competing in Unihack 2018 Melbourne. This was a really amazing weekend and I had a lot of fun, met some awesome people and learnt a lot. The team I was with this year decided to do something a bit different this year compared to last year. Our idea was essentially to create a fantasy sports/supercoach like game where the players on your team are Twitch streamers. Talking to people was really interesting as some people were really excited about it, while others weren't very enthused by the conecpt at all. This game would probably be targeted most at the really active twicth community.

The day started off with an opportunity to talk to some of the sponsers who came along which was lots of fun. It was nice to see a big range of companies represented, and they were all really happy to talk and had really great insight. Soon afterwards we got started and I mostly worked on the front-end design aspects. We chose to use Vue for this project, as we mostly all knew it pretty well. During the first few hours we focussed on the game mechanics, and this probably slowed us down quite a lot, as we decided to pivot from our original idea (to use Youtubers as the players) to twitch. So one lesson I defintiely took away this year is to come with a more fleshed out idea, though I am quite pleased with the product we ended up with. Through a ridiculous amount of red bull we continued hacking though the night, and before long it was morning and the competition was over. The site was fairly polished, though fairly feature poor, so there is certainly a lot more to do, if we are to continue pursuing this idea. At the prize ceremony it was annoucned that we had won Best Startup Potential Hack, courtesy of Wade Institute. This was super exciting and the prize (going to a 3-day startup sprint) is super amazing, and the whole team is looking forward to it a lot. Overall Unihack this year was a really great experience and I absolutely loved talking to people over the weekend, and I am continuing learning how to approach the unique challenge that hackathons provide. Check out the code here Check out the project here